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Firbank Fell's Challenge to 21st Century Quakerism

On Sunday, June 13th, 1652, about a thousand people
gathered on an isolated hillside in rural northern England to listen to a
little-known but charismatic young man named George Fox preach. The
sermon lasted three hours. It is always risky to look for a particular
date on which a religious movement is born, but many choose this as the
time Quakerism was born.

349 years later, my family was staying in Briggflatts Meetinghouse,
located just a few miles from Firbank Fell. The meetinghouse is only a
stone's throw up the lane from Borrats, a stately old home owned by a
Separatist justice of the peace in 1652 and one of the first places Fox
visited in the area. Each June Friends in the region honor this
important event in our collective history by holding a "Fox's Pulpit
Meeting". Fox's Pulpit is the name given to the rock, now marked with a
plaque, on which Fox stood during his sermon. Usually this meeting for
worship is held in the sheep pasture where the original sermon was
delivered. Because of the foot and mouth epidemic last summer, the
meeting had to be moved indoors to Briggflatts Meeting. Friends were
busily planning with other religious groups in the area a special
commemoration the 350th anniversary, which occurred this summer.

We went looking for Fox's pulpit the day after we arrived. On our
way back from Sedbergh (where Fox had preached just outside the parish
church during a large hiring fair), we turned up the wrong narrow
country lane. Later back at the Meetinghouse, I found a map on the wall
and was able to figure out our error. While my wife Annie was putting
our seven year old to bed, I asked our 14 year old, Nate, to join me on a
walk. The moon was full and the air was warm. When I told him I'd
figured out where we had gotten lost earlier in the day, Nate exclaimed:
"Let's go now!"

I pondered a few minutes, full of adult concerns. We had only
intended to walk down to the end of the little lane where the
meetinghouse is located. I was pretty sure I could find my way to Fox's
Pulpit this time but had no idea really how long it would take. Would
Annie worry if we were out a long time? I took the leap: how can you
turn down a wide-eyed teenager full of enthusiasm to hike by moonlight
to the birthplace of his faith community!

It was a long hike and I got pretty winded keeping up with my
athletic teenager as we pressed up the long climb to the fell. But this
time we didn't get lost. We gazed ruefully over the stonewall to the
boulder with its marker and decided, reluctantly, to honor the health
department rules. The fragrance of the fell filled our lungs. Only a few
farmhouse lights pierced the darkness now that the moon had hidden in
the clouds. Only the wind and an occasional bleat disturbed the silence.
(The area may well be less populated today than it was 350 years ago.)
We held our own brief two-person worship celebrating that great day at
the edge of the lane before beginning our return hike to Briggflatts,
taking great leaps on the lane's steep drop off the fell.

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Fox's 1652 visit
to Westmoreland to who we are and who we could be as Friends. There are
three key things that we can say about that event. All speak
powerfully to key spiritual challenges facing our Quaker movement today.

REACHING OUT. First and
foremost, the decision to go to Westmoreland and preach at Firbank
involved the choice by Fox and his tiny group of followers to reach out
beyond their boundaries.

Deborah Haines, clerk of FGC's Advancement
& Outreach Committee, has written about Firbank that it is good to
remember that Quakerism was born in outreach. Surely this is one of the
great outreach events of all time! In the space of a few months, the
Quaker movement not only grew from a handful of believers to several
thousand but recruited a large share of the incredible cadre of leaders
at the center of its first generation.

Fox's ministry did not begin in Westmoreland that summer. He already
had important followers working with him such as Elizabeth Hooten and
Richard Farnsworth. He had spent a year in jail in Derby for his
heretical preaching. But his group was tiny up to that point.

The loosely-organized separatist community of Westmoreland Seekers
was largely incorporated en masse into the new Quaker Movement following
the summer months Fox spent in the area. Several of the key leaders on
the new movement including John Audland and Francis Howgill trace their
convincement to the Firbank sermon. The convincement of Edward
Burroughs in Kendal and Margaret Fell in Ulverston followed within a few
weeks. All things being said, it is fair to conclude that it is
unlikely that our Quaker Movement would have been born without Fox's
ready response to his vision on Pendle Hill of a "great people to be
gathered" in the North.

I confess to some lack of enthusiasm for the word "outreach" itself.
Liberal Friends give at least lip service to the need for outreach but
are generally deeply opposed to evangelism. The idea of reaching out
beyond our own community is great, of course, but the word outreach
seems to connote an outwardly-motivated obligation to try and recruit
new members into an organization. In contrast, the word evangelism
denotes an inwardly-generated compulsion to share the good news of one's
own experience with others.

Although the faith of Fox and other early Friends was very different
than that of modern evangelical Protestants, it is undeniable that First
Generation Friends were evangelical to a degree that would appall most
liberal Friends today. These early leaders of our movement felt under a
deep spiritual necessity to share their religious convictions with
others who did not (as yet) share their faith. This was in part because
they felt unabashedly convinced of the truth of their own beliefs. It
was also presumably due to their strong concern for the spiritual state
of those believing and practicing differently.

I would not claim to understand what makes Friends today (myself
included) so reluctant to share our beliefs and experience with
non-Friends. It may be in part that we are reluctant to stand out as
being too peculiar. We seem willing enough, however, to be out of the
mainstream on secular issues like not flying flags from our car
antennas!
I suspect that the biggest block in me to sharing my spiritual life with
others is my anxiety to avoid coming off as anything like a Jehovah's
Witness. I am so afraid of being considered (by whom: myself? other
Friends? by God?) as pushy and self-righteous that too often I hold back
from sharing my deepest beliefs and experiences at all with
non-Friends. Many Friends also fear that by sharing we will somehow
take away other's freedom to believe what is right for them.

And yet there are certainly as many people out there longing for the
Quaker message today as there were in Fox's time. The invitation to the
Fell sermon was not limited to card-carrying Westmoreland Seekers. Fox
and the Valiant Sixty were led to communicate their message to those
outside their circle of followers in homes, marketplaces, taverns,
courtrooms, military barracks, palaces and the worship services of other
Christian groups. They did so to people of every class and even those
like Native Americans or the Sultan that most people at the time would
have considered highly unlikely to grasp their message. They were
utterly unafraid of being ignored, rejected, ridiculed, or persecuted
for trying to explain what they found to be Truth.

Deborah Haines has said that outreach is about welcoming the stranger
among us - the one we least expect to respond to our Quaker message.
The stranger is waiting outside our Meetinghouse walls.
What will it take for this to change? What will it take for us to care
so deeply about the host of seekers longing for Truth that surround us
in the world today - until the barriers fall away to reaching out with
all the passion that filled Fox and his companions' hearts 350 years
ago?

SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY. The second key characteristic of Firbank is that it involved response to spiritual authority.
Why did so many Seekers and other Northern Separatists enter the Quaker
movement during that summer in 1652? When a listener was chastising Fox
for preaching outdoors in the Sedbergh churchyard, Francis Howgill
silenced him by declaring that "This man [Fox] speaks with authority,
and not as the scribes." William Sewel concludes his account of the
Firbank sermon Firbank with: "Thus preached G. Fox, and his ministry was
at that time accompanied with such a convincing power, and so reached
the hearts of the people, that many, and even all the teachers of that
congregation, who were many, were convinced of that Truth which was
declared to them."

The Westmoreland Seekers rejected as false the spiritual authority of
the Church of England and of the independent sects of the day. They
were waiting for true spiritual authority. When they encountered it in
the person and preaching of George Fox, they responded whole-heartedly.
His message that he had encountered Christ in an immediate experiential
way, available to teach and lead them Himself, struck a deep resonant
chord within them. They responded by joining the nascent Quaker
movement.

As Friends we hold dear the access that each of us has to this Inward
Christ (or Light or Spirit). This radical egalitarianism can serve us
ill, however, if it leads us to crush spiritual authority when it arises
among us. Past generations of Friends recognized the need to recognize
and nurture spiritual gifts in our midst, gifts that vary greatly from
member to member. A universal ministry can all too easily deteriorate
into a ministry of none.

The term "weighty Friend" was often used pejoratively when I first
heard it in the 1960's, implying a stodgy older (probably birthright?)
Friend resistant to fresh ideas and change. The term originally had a
very different meaning. It referred to the ability of a clerk in a
business meeting to recognize and respond to spiritual authority (or
"weight") when it appears there. Failure to recognize, respond to and
nurture spiritual authority leads to the impoverishment of our meetings
for worship and business - and the likelihood that those with gifts of
spiritual leadership will be discouraged and sidetracked from exercising
those gifts, that we need so desperately, among us.

If our movement is to flourish and grow, the pendulum needs to swing
back toward recognition and celebration of spiritual authority when it
arises in our midst. We do not need to abandon our commitment to the
universal ministry in order to do so. We do need to recover our ability
as a faith community to discern God breaking in through the words and
lives of others among us.

COMMUNITY. The third key to Firbank is that it entailed the choice of religious community over an individual spiritual path.

Although Fox may have remained through out his life "first among
equals" among Friends, the rich diversity of women and men making up the
Valiant Sixty guaranteed that Quakerism was a true movement and not
simply a one-man show. Even if Fox's robust body had not enabled him to
live through the brutal beatings and imprisonment that cost the lives of
many other early Quaker leaders, it seems likely that the movement
would have lived on and flourished after the 1652 influx of leadership.

In incorporating the Westmoreland Seeker movement into his group of
followers, Fox made a decisive choice to build a coherent movement
rather than remain a lonely voice decrying the dismal state of religious
groups existing at the time. The Seeker movement also made a clear
decision in 1652 to move from informal association of like-minded people
to a clearly-defined community knit together by the effort to be
corporately accountable to God.

Although we do not know a great deal about the Westmoreland Seekers,
it seems that they shared with Quakerism the rejection of outward rites
and rigid creeds. If they had not been brought into a more coherent
movement, it seems unlikely that they would be remembered or have
survived any more than a host of other small Separatist sects at the
time. In joining the Quaker movement, the Seekers became Finders - they
had found a Truth in Fox's ministry that rang true to them. They were
choosing to be part of a community with leadership, with coherent
theology, and with clear standards of lifestyle.

But their choice was not simply one of community, but of community
under the direct leadership of the living Inward Christ. The unique
discovery of this new movement was that they could discern God's voice
as a community - in their worship and eventually in their gatherings to
make decisions together. Although the formal structure of "gospel order"
with its several levels of meetings to discern God's voice was still
years away, it is apparent that Friends began practicing corporate
discernment in more informal ways from the earliest days of their
movement. And Friends basically became a movement rather than a
collection of individual followers in 1652.

In contrast, there is a powerful bias towards spiritual individualism
in our Quaker movement today. There are both internal and external
reasons for this. Many Friends in the early 20th century reacted
strongly against what they saw as the excessive corporate discipline of
meeting life, with its elders and recorded ministers too concerned in
the theological purity of meeting members and organs hidden in their
attics. In addition, we live in a society that holds personal freedom
in high regard. It is important to recognize the impact that this
cultural bias has on our attitudes as Friends today towards corporate
accountability.

As a result of both these influences, it is unclear whether there is
anything a Friend can do today to elicit the explicit concern of other
members in their meeting. Many meetings also feel it is beyond their
right to establish any clear boundaries that would exclude potential
meeting recruits. Most Friends today prefer to remain "seekers" and
reject the corporate spiritual life that evolved in the Quaker movement
born at Firbank.

Will Friends today be open to God leading us back into community with
each other in vital fresh ways, so that we become once again a movement
led by the inward voice of Christ? Will our 350th birthday be an
opportunity for rediscovering the spiritual power of Fox and his
companions or just a chance to honor and remember them? Can I capture
in my heart the boundless energy with which Nate led me in search of
Fox's pulpit and redirect it into carrying Truth to others who are
waiting today to hear the Quaker message communicated with passion and
authority? With God's help, anything is possible!

It is as a "religion of life" that Quakerism will be presented in the future and is being presented now.

Its distinguishing note will be its resolve to bring all this human life of ours under the transforming power of spiritual life.It
will stand out against all divisions and compartments that separate the
sacred from the secular, the sanctuary from the outward world of
nature, the sacrament from the days' common work, the clergy from the
laity.

It will tell of a Christian
experience that makes all life sacred and all days holy, all nature a
sanctuary, all work a sacrament, and gives to every man and woman in the
body fit place and service.Its concern will be to
multiply men and women who will have a message of power because they are
themselves the children of light.It will claim the whole
of man's life, and the whole of life, individual, social, national
international, for the dominion of the will of God.

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Quote that speaks to me

They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies. Nor can spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their friendship. If absence be not death, neither is theirs. Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this Divine Glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This
is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet
their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present,
because immortal. - William Penn, More Fruits of Solitude, 1702.

Note: This passage was quoted by J.K.Rowling as the epigraph of her novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

It is as a "religion of life" that Quakerism will be presented in the future and is being presented now.

Its distinguishing note will be its resolve to bring all this human life of ours under the transforming power of spiritual life.It
will stand out against all divisions and compartments that separate the
sacred from the secular, the sanctuary from the outward world of
nature, the sacrament from the days' common work, the clergy from the
laity.

It will tell of a Christian
experience that makes all life sacred and all days holy, all nature a
sanctuary, all work a sacrament, and gives to every man and woman in the
body fit place and service.Its concern will be to
multiply men and women who will have a message of power because they are
themselves the children of light.It will claim the whole
of man's life, and the whole of life, individual, social, national
international, for the dominion of the will of God.